Our View: A breathtaking imbalance

Tuesday

Jan 21, 2014 at 7:04 PM

It borders on impossible to wrap your arms around, but Earth's richest 85 people own the collective wealth of its poorest 3.5 billion, nearly half the planet's population, according to the international relief organization Oxfam. You read that correctly.

It is always advisable to be suspicious of such numbers, but in fact world leaders from President Obama to Pope Francis have begun to take notice, with income inequality likely to be among the primary topics of discussion at the World Economic Forum that begins today in Davos, Switzerland.

As we have written before, such obscene economic imbalance, such concentration of resources and corresponding political power in the hands of the few — not witnessed to this extent in almost a century — has moral and pragmatic components, arguably threatening democracy, the peace and that very prosperity. Those who continue to ignore it, to grab as much as they can at the exploitation of and to the exclusion of others, do so at their peril. Evidently we are not alone in that fear.